Sculptor Sarah Maloney’s idea of a pleasure ground is a little more literal. It’s the title of her most recent solo exhibition, on display at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, until October 12, 2025. Pleasure Ground investigates both the body and sexuality (pleasure) as well as plants and other elements of the natural world (ground).

This exhibition has been seven years in the making. Maloney first started looking for interested collaborators back in 2018 and connected with Art Windsor-Essex, a gallery in Windsor, Ontario, and Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax. The two organizations took on a curatorial role, and with support from Canadian Heritage’s Museum Assistance program, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery also came on board as a venue. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, and everything stopped. 

Leadership at the galleries changed hands, but they were still excited about the potential of getting Maloney’s work into their spaces, so in October of 2023, Pleasure Ground finally opened. 

Pleasure Ground is not a retrospective but does include pieces from all stages of Maloney’s career. The earliest piece is from 1993, when she was pregnant with her first child, and the most recent is a group of three pieces from 2021. The works in the exhibition are all vastly different from each other in size, shape, and medium and yet surprisingly cohesive in theme.

Throughout Pleasure Ground, Maloney challenges colonialism and the sneaky ways it has crept into every corner of our lives. The titular sculpture, completed in 2019, consists of a group of roughly four- to six-inch-tall, bronze Northern pitcher plants, carnivorous plants often found in bogs in Maloney’s native Nova Scotia. The plants, divorced from their natural habitat and placed in a gallery, become less recognizable as flora, calling to mind instead something vaguely suggestive of genitalia. 

The extraction of native plants and their placement in an institution are ideas Maloney toys with in other works as well. She challenges the colonial practice of collecting exotic plants through embroidery in her series of three titled Collect-Arrange (2021). These large-scale pieces are of embroidered vases, all from the British Museum collection, filled with flowers based on historical botanical illustrations. In the frame, Maloney has sculpted native Nova Scotia flowers in plaster. This both explores the exploitation due to colonialism and challenges the notion of “women’s work.” 

In her artist statement, Maloney writes, “needlework historically was a way for wealthy women to pass the time, they too were part of a collection kept at home while men went off to explore. I am drawn to embroidery because its history, process, and materiality speak to both traditional and contemporary ideas of women’s work.”

It is very difficult to choose which works to highlight, as they are all incredibly intricate and vibrant, humming with symbolism and patriarchal dissent. I could highlight Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx (1998–1999), a collection of knitted organs that were created during Maloney’s second pregnancy, or Skin (2003–2012), a life-sized, beaded skin-suit that took nine years to complete. Then there’s her Reflection series (2010), which combines found furniture with bronze sculptures of orchids, their sexuality hidden behind a mirror image, and the most visually striking piece in the exhibition, Water Level (2012–2016), which reinterprets a pond landscape through a feminist lens by casting water lilies and lily pads in bronze and raising them up to eye level so you can walk through, raising questions of who is placed in view and why. 

One of the interesting things about a touring exhibition is seeing how the different gallery spaces interplay with the work. At the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Pleasure Ground is divided into two separate spaces. One is upstairs, with incredibly high ceilings, bright lights, and white gallery walls. The other, downstairs, is darker, with dark green walls and focused lighting. The exhibition spaces lend themselves to very different themes; the pieces in the basement room, whether intentionally or not, have more of a sexual overtone, highlighting the feminist elements of her work.

This decision, however, might lead viewers to miss some of Maloney’s work. The two rooms are separated by a staircase and a hallway, but there is no signage indicating that each space is just one part of a larger exhibition, or where to find the other half. This is more of an institutional critique than a curatorial one, but I could have easily left having only seen half of the show if I hadn’t decided to keep browsing the gallery.

Even if you accidentally only see half of Pleasure Ground (which you shouldn’t, now that you know it’s in two spaces), it would still be an intellectual and visual feast for your eyes. Pleasure Ground was exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex, then Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, and is at the Beaverbrook until October 12, 2025, when it will then head to the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown. 

Jericho Knopp is a writer and arts administrator based in Menahqesk (Saint John), New Brunswick, whose work explores narratives surrounding beauty, nostalgia, and mental illness. Her practice is primarily non-fiction based, but she also dabbles in poetry and prose. Her journalism has appeared in the CBC, CreatedHere, Visual Arts News, the Telegraph-Journal, and the Georgia Straight. Her narrative non-fiction has received support from artsnb and THIRD SHIFT festival, and her fiction has appeared in the FLOURISH Festival zine, and It’s Burning Off. She currently works as the programming director for ArtsLink NB.